About 99% of BitTorrent Content is Copyright-Infringing

I’m sure this will come as no surprise to anyone, but the vast majority of content being shared using the BitTorrent protocol is of an “illegal” copyright-infringing manner. That includes movies, games and other software, music, pornography, images, and believe it or not… books. The fact that illegal content is downloaded often on BitTorrent is widely-accepted, but did you realize the number could be as high as 99%?

A senior at Princeton, Sauhard Sahi, recently spent some time doing research on this very subject, and his target was the Mainline DHT (distributed hash table) where most of these illegal torrent transfers occur. During his research, he found a total of 1,021 torrents to run his numbers with, and in addition to the categories above, 14% include files that don’t fit into a normal one (this would include Linux distros, but those are of course not illegal).

Of all the files, 46% were movies or TV shows, and given the number of people I know who acquire most of their movies and shows this way, I can’t say I’m too surprised. In addition to the 14% that belongs to a non-describable content, another 14% of downloaded content was games and music, while yet another 14% was for pornography.

What I do find interesting is that a mere 10% of the offending files were music, because the way I saw it, it was music that started the entire mess of “illegal downloading”. But if you look at it from the standpoint that there are many more TV shows and movies out there than music albums that people may be interested in, it’s becomes easier to understand. The rest of the content belonged to books, gadgets and images, with a combined total of 2%.

I have to say that it’s numbers like these that really make you understand why there’s such a fuss over illegal downloading, because it simply cannot be denied that it’s a problem. I can’t wait until the general media takes better advantage of BitTorrent and what it’s capable of so that we can begin to see that number go down. At 99%, all BitTorrent users begin to look a little bad!

Sahi also analyzed whether the content was infringement, checking to see if was in the public domain, freely available via legitimate channels, or user-generated content. Based on this study, 100 percent of the movie/TV show sample was found to be infringing, as well as all of the music torrents. Seven of the 148 files in games/software were found to be noninfringing (two were Linux distros), and one of the 145 porn files was given the benefit of the doubt as noninfringing. Overall, about one percent of the total files were categorized as “likely noninfringing.”